Shadowsocks is a proxy that has been designed and used to circumvent censorship in China. So if it’s possible to get traffic across the Great Firewall of China it pretty much can be used anywhere, e.g. Egypt where VPNs are blocked since mid 2017.
Digital Ocean offers virtual servers for cheap with an easy to understand pricing model. Basically you pay either $5, $10, $20, $40, $80 or $160 per month, for more have a look at pricing at digitalocean.com. These server are general purpose servers, you can do everything with them, which also means, they don’t have anything installed and you need to do everything yourself.
oneclickshadowsocks.de is a service to install shadowsocks on DigitalOcean servers without having to actually login via SSH and entering lots of technical commands in the commandline. It uses the DigitalOcean API to create a Droplet (=server) with shadowsocks already set up and running. All you have to do is to enter the IP address you get via e-mail in your shadowsocks client and the password given to you on the website.
The code is open source and the website itself is hosted on GitHub Pages, which means, you can see the sourcecode of the page itself, running at that very moment. This way other people can verify they nothing shady is going on.
